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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27129355">Descent</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/muldezgron/pseuds/muldezgron'>muldezgron</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>To Know and Be Known [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bloodmoon!Teldryn, Draugr (Elder Scrolls) - Freeform, Elder Scrolls Lore, Financial Issues, Implied/Referenced Asshole Last Dragonborn, Linking the Events of Bloodmoon and Dragonborn for Fun and Profit, M/M, Minus the Profit, Miraak Lives (Elder Scrolls), Sexual Content, Side Quests, Unfortunately "Lives" Does Not Mean "Lives Well", no beta we die like men</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 19:27:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>14,795</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27129355</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/muldezgron/pseuds/muldezgron</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>While Teldryn Sero was away on a job, an outlander came to Raven Rock and left behind a strangely familiar Nord. Teldryn damn well knows he should mind his own business, but his curiosity will get the better of him anyway.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Miraak/Teldryn Sero</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>To Know and Be Known [2]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1980157</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Descent</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>The blame for this one falls squarely on a two-day power outage that left me unable to work on the existing drafts I have, while still itching to write something. So I thought, "Fine! I'll write a sequel to <i>The One with the Spear Hole in it</i>, why not," and wrote the first scene long-hand to give myself something to do. Then the power came back, and I realized, "Shit, now I'm invested," so I hunkered down and finished the rest.</p><p>No beta, because I don't know anyone who will beta nearly 15k of this kind of rarepair madness. Although it's a sequel, I tried to make it as standalone as possible, so you don't <i>have</i> to have read <i>The One with the Spear Hole in it</i>... but it's a fraction of the length and gets spoiled massively, so you should probably read it first if you haven't already.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was not an unusual sight to see Teldryn Sero sauntering into the Retching Netch the evening of his arrival back in Solstheim after weeks on the job. The mer practically lived there, after all. What was unusual was for Teldryn to make a beeline for the bar, and instead of rapping on the wood to get Geldis Sadri’s attention and a drink, he slid onto a stool at the bar, leaning onto the counter with his arms folded.</p><p>Sadri had been wiping a wet glass dry with a cloth, but at the sight of Teldryn on the stool, he set it aside immediately. They both knew that if Teldryn was sitting at the bar, he didn’t just want a drink. He wanted to talk. Discreetly.</p><p>“The usual?” asked Sadri.</p><p>“Might have some shein this time, actually,” replied Teldryn. His chitin helmet was still on, and there was something almost cheerful in the tone of his voice. Sadri raised an eyebrow, but said nothing until after he’d dipped away and returned with a snifter of shein.</p><p>“What’s with you?” he asked, voice low enough that no one else would hear, sliding the snifter over with one hand.</p><p>Teldryn shook with barely restrained laughter. “Oh, you have <em>no idea</em>.” He reached up and unlatched his helmet, sliding it off and lowering the front of his scarf with a single motion. His face was flush, his eyes looked almost sleepy, and his mouth was curled into a much less wry smile than the one that usually graced his features.</p><p>“Ah,” said Sadri, knowingly. Even a bartender without his background would recognize the signs. “That good, then?”</p><p>Teldryn merely took his snifter of shein and glanced at Sadri as he lifted it to his mouth. It was a glance that took “You have no idea” and underlined it three times with red ink.</p><p>“Aren’t you the lucky muthsera,” he mused. “Almost makes me want to give them a free drink just for making you less of a grumpy fetcher.”</p><p>“Oh, <em>they</em> get the free drink, do they?” asked Teldryn. “No free drink for the grumpy fetcher, I take it?” As he spoke, he was already tapping a short stack of coins onto the counter with his free hand.</p><p>“Not even,” said Sadri, taking the stack with a smirk, “for not making me put this on your tab.”</p><p>“Damn,” said Teldryn, laughing as he spoke.</p><p>The sound of boots on the floor cued them both in to someone’s approach, and the two Dunmer turned to see who it was—a tall man in a golden mask, carrying a bowl in his gloved hands. Teldryn immediately started, almost spilling his drink, and turned away. He raised his glass before his face with both hands, breathing into it more than he was actually drinking it.</p><p>“Ah, done already?” asked Sadri, taking the bowl from the man. “That was fast. Were you wanting seconds?”</p><p>There was a long pause as the man in the mask seemed to give this question more thought than it usually warranted. Teldryn continued to face away, breathing his shein, though Sadri noted his eyes kept darting back in the man’s direction.</p><p>“I do, but I shouldn’t,” said the man, finally. His voice somehow managed to sound sonorous and otherworldly even when it also sounded uncomfortable. “I do not have enough to afford more now and still pay tomorrow morning. I—” His thick accent trailed off, sounding almost embarrassed.</p><p>“I’ll put it on your tab, then,” said Sadri, already ladling out a steaming bowl of stew.</p><p>“That’s unnecessary,” he said.</p><p>“If it doesn’t get eaten, it just goes to waste,” replied Sadri, practically shoving the bowl into his hands. “Besides, no one works well on an empty stomach. Better to eat now and pay it back than go without and not be able to buy more.”</p><p>The man began to reach for his coin purse anyway.</p><p>“It’s on your tab,” he said, giving him a stern look.</p><p>He bowed his head, defeated. “I will repay you the moment I can,” he said.</p><p>“That’s what a tab is,” replied Sadri, matter-of-factly. “Now get going before it gets cold.”</p><p>He retreated from the counter, heading back around the corner and down the hall. The bar seemed still and quiet in spite of the rumble of ambient conversation, until the soft clatter of a door closing seemed to pierce through the air.</p><p>Teldryn slammed his snifter down hard enough to splash shein on the wood and flung himself forward, hands on the counter, face inches away from Sadri’s.</p><p>“Who was that?” he whispered, so forcefully it was almost a hiss.</p><p>“Hm?” Sadri turned his head just enough to look Teldryn up and down, more surprised by his reaction than anything else. “That’s just Miraak. He’ll have the money tomorrow—he’s too proud not to. Unlike <em>someone</em> I know, who makes me wait months before he pays off his tab.”</p><p>Normally this kind of a comment would lead to a volley of harmless barbs between the two of them, as you do, but Teldryn just slowly lowered himself back down onto the stool with An Expression on his face.</p><p>“Ah, wait,” said Sadri, realization dawning on him. “You were off working when he showed up here, weren’t you?” He sighed, scratching his chin. “I’ve got to admit, if it wasn’t for the outlander, I’d probably forget he was new to Raven Rock. Feels more like he’s always been here and just fell on some hard times, you know?”</p><p>It somehow went without saying that “the outlander” was not Miraak. It somehow even went without saying that Miraak was never an “outlander”—that to call him such would be Wrong in much the same way as rocks falling up into the sky would be.</p><p>“What kind of outlander?” asked Teldryn.</p><p>“Altmer,” replied Sadri. “The kind that shows up to a Dunmer settlement wearing Thalmor robes when he isn’t even Thalmor.”</p><p>Teldryn grimaced. “Charming.”</p><p>“You don’t know the least of it,” he sighed. “Tried to pay for his room entirely in bottles of mead. It’s not bad stuff—Honningbrew, Black-Briar, even a bottle or two of reserve—but it’s going to take the sailors forever to work their way through it.”</p><p>“Ah, a <em>cheapskate</em>,” said Teldryn, dryly. “He’ll be the most popular mer in Raven Rock at this rate.”</p><p>Geldis Sadri gave the wide shrug of a proprietor who has had to handle much, much worse before. “Anyway, he showed up here a day or two after you left—must’ve caught the Northern Maiden coming back from Windhelm. Didn’t do much at first, just asked around about Miraak and no one had anything to tell him. Left town, didn’t see much of him for a week, and then suddenly he shows up with Miraak in tow and tries to rent Mogrul’s old room with nothing but mead.”</p><p>“Wait, hold on.” His brows furrowed in confusion. “Since when is it Mogrul’s ‘old room’?”</p><p>“Oh, that’s right, that happened too,” said Sadri, a half-smile on his face. “So Drovas ran off to Tel Mithryn to work for Neloth, without so much as a ‘thank you kindly Sadri’, and then Mogrul ‘mysteriously disappeared’.” His expression as he spoke made it very clear that he didn’t find it very mysterious but did find it very welcome.</p><p>“And his dog?” asked Teldryn, meaning Slitter, Mogrul’s Dunmer—assistant? friend? lover? No one had ever been sure exactly <em>what</em> they were, other than violent and seemingly inseparable.</p><p>Sadri gestured so broadly it could have been mistaken for the benediction of a saint. “They were both last seen talking to the outlander, and then no one ever saw them again.”</p><p>Teldryn took a long sip of shein from the snifter, a thoughtful look in his eyes.</p><p>“At least he’s competent,” he finally said. “So it’s him and Miraak in Mogrul’s old room?”</p><p>“Just Miraak for now,” said Sadri. “The outlander sort of dumped him here and left town again. Even asked me to make sure he didn’t leave the club while he was gone.”</p><p>“You were willing to do that?”</p><p>“Well, no,” he said, wiping down the counter. “I told him that if he wanted to put him in prison he’d need to talk to the Redoran guard. Wasn’t too happy about it, but what’s he going to do? Take back all the mead?”</p><p>“Or you could ‘mysteriously disappear,’” Teldryn pointed out.</p><p>Sadri made a noise that was somewhere between an insulted huff and a laugh. “I’d like to see him try.”</p><p>_</p><p>Later that night in his room, Teldryn mulled over the events of the day as he changed out of his armor and got ready for bed. His mulling was mostly chiding himself for what these events were bringing out in him. It wasn’t like him to fixate on some random unknown at a bath club—though not entirely random, he noted with a shiver—and it wasn’t like him to not be able to leave whatever happened at the door.</p><p>There were so many men in Raven Rock that he could be reasonably sure he’d buried to the hilt in his throat. He wasn’t exactly tripping over himself every time he ran into Fethis Alor, was he?</p><p>Plus, Miraak was skint, and seemingly involved with the most irritating kind of Altmer. Normally either one of those things would be a massive turn-off.</p><p>And yet.</p><p>It was as if he was having an argument with himself, his body versus his mind.</p><p>It’s done, it happened, it’s over now, the mind of Teldryn Sero was saying. It was great and I’m glad it happened but now we need to move on.</p><p>I’m not finished, said the body of Teldryn Sero. I want more.</p><p>You greedy little fetcher, the mind said. That was the best we’ve had in years.</p><p>That’s why I want more, replied the body. If that’s what his mouth can do, what about the rest of him?</p><p>It’s not our business, said the mind. A spear hole doesn’t promise anything else. That’s the point. It’s low effort and low demand. You don’t have to remember anniversaries, you don’t have to make sexy eye contact—</p><p>I like sexy eye contact, said the body.</p><p>We don’t even know <em>what he looks like</em>, said the mind.</p><p>That’s hot, said the body.</p><p>Are you even listening to me? asked the mind.</p><p>The body’s only response was a stiff erection, as if flipping the mind off without hands.</p><p>Azura’s Star, swore the mind. You’re hopeless.</p><p>And that was roughly the situation Teldryn Sero found himself in that night when he went to bed and tried to sleep. His body was infuriatingly ready for a round two that was not happening, to the extent that even the touch of bedsheets against his skin was driving him mad.</p><p>With a sigh of resignation, he let his hand trace a path along his hip and down to his cock, curled his fingers around himself, and began to stroke. He allowed himself to imagine he was not alone in the dark, that a stomach was pressed against the small of his back and arms had reached around his sides, one hand clasped to his chest and holding him tightly, the other wrapped around his cock. He moaned quietly as he imagined a hard cock lying against his inner thigh and a familiar mouth placing soft little kisses along the back of his neck and shoulder—</p><p><em>Why are you so into that?</em> screamed his mind. It’s ridiculous!</p><p>It’s sincere and sincerity is <em>fucking hot</em>, said his body. He does it because he enjoys it, because he fucking wants to, because he fucking wants <em>me</em>—</p><p>He swore as his hips bucked forward at the thought. He imagined that resonant moan happening right there in the bed with him, arms trembling with desire, and he was panting, gasping, practically fucking his own hand in desperation.</p><p>He came hard, face shoved into the pillow in the effort to muffle his cry. The tension released in slow, seizure-like spasms, replaced by a relaxed warmth, sleepy relief, and mild irritation at the fact that he was going to have to buy replacement sheets for Sadri in the morning, because that was definitely going to leave a stain.</p><p>_</p><p>After breakfast, Teldryn went to Fethis’s stall to buy bedsheets. He nearly forgot what he was asking for when, mid-sentence, he glanced to his left and saw Miraak in Garyn Ienth’s field, harvesting ash yams. He fought to tear his eyes away and return to the transaction at hand, but there was just something so keenly wrong about it, against the natural order, a netch crawling on the ground instead of floating in the air.</p><p>Fethis, he realized, was also casting furtive glances at Garyn’s field, a stitch of embarrassment in his voice as he tried to talk about thread counts. Even Milore and Garyn looked unsettled, as if everyone present knew that Miraak should not be on his knees in the ash pulling vegetables out of the ground, but no one had a better solution, so let’s all pretend This Mortifying Thing Is Not Happening.</p><p>He worked quickly, at least. Once every yam had been harvested and Garyn had looked them over, Miraak received his wages. The instant the last septim was in his hand, before dusting himself off or even taking out his own coin purse, he turned and briskly walked back to the Retching Netch.</p><p>Sadri had not been exaggerating. The man couldn’t even stand being a single bowl of stew in debt <em>for a full day</em>.</p><p>Miraak’s work was somehow not over after that. He spent an hour harvesting scathecraw and trama root around town for Milore Ienth. He spent another hour skinning hides and trimming leather for Glover Mallory. He took a break for lunch at the Retching Netch, eaten in his room with the door closed, and then he was running errands for Fethis Alor, hauling crates of supplies from the docks to his stall. It was exhausting just watching him.</p><p>Teldryn hadn’t really meant to start watching him. It was just impossible not to. It felt like every time he looked up, there was Miraak, running around doing all the small jobs Raven Rock had to offer without leaving the city walls.</p><p>When he saw Miraak walking with purpose towards the entrance to the old mine, he told himself: This is the line. Don’t cross this line. If you’re going about your business and he happens to be around, that’s fine, it’s awkward but things happen. But if he goes somewhere you never go and you follow him—congratulations, Teldryn Sero, you are officially being a creepy s’wit. Don’t be that s’wit, Sero. Stay on this side of the line.</p><p>He lasted about five minutes before he found himself sprinting across the line, cursing himself the whole way.</p><p>_</p><p>Teldryn was surprised to hear the echo of voices talking when he entered the mine, though his surprise vanished when he recognized one of the voices as Crescius Caerellius. Of course it was. He’d actually approached Teldryn in the Retching Netch a few months earlier, trying to get him on board with his conspiracy theory-fueled hunt for The Truth About His Great-Grandfather’s Death. Teldryn’s only response had been to name his price; Crescius blanched, and they never spoke about it again. One of the many advantages of pricing himself at least half of what he was worth: it weeded out crazy.</p><p>The other voice was Aphia Velothi, Crescius’s wife, which also made sense. She had the unenviable position of trying to keep her husband from flinging himself off a cliff, and given what happened last time Crescius sneaked into the mine, that wasn’t even a metaphor.</p><p>The real surprise came when Teldryn approached close enough to understand what they were saying.</p><p>“You really don’t need to do this,” he heard Aphia say. “My husband is a little—”</p><p>“A little what?” Crescius sounded a little snippy. As usual, these days.</p><p>“I just don’t know that there’s anything down there to find,” she said. “It was so long ago.”</p><p>“If there is nothing,” he heard Miraak say, “Then there is nothing. I cannot promise that I will find his remains. Only that I will try.”</p><p>“Are you sure you don’t want me to come down with you?” asked Crescius. “I have a good eye for—”</p><p>“Stay with your wife, Crescius,” Miraak said, harshly, almost a command, and then Teldryn heard the sound of boots descending rickety wooden steps.</p><p>This nudged the position of the line quite a bit. Following someone who was just going about their day was obsessive. Following someone who was charging into danger could be the very thing that saves his life. Miraak was not unarmed—he carried a sword and staff, both of equally strange design—and Teldryn knew with certainty, somehow, that he was unlikely to be taken down by a frostbite spider or two. Still, his gut had overridden “don’t follow him, that’s creepy” with “follow him, else he’s going to get himself killed”, and that counted for something.</p><p>He took a deep breath, counted to three, and rounded the corner as casually as he could manage. Aphia and Crescius were standing near the stairs, peering down into the depths, but as he approached, they both looked up at him with wide, blinking eyes.</p><p>“What in the blazes are you doing here?” asked Crescius.</p><p>“No time to talk, here on business,” said Teldryn, brushing his way past the old man.</p><p>He stared at him, incredulously. “What business could anyone have in an abandoned mine?”</p><p>“You couldn’t pay me enough to tell you,” replied Teldryn. It was technically true.</p><p>Miraak made surprisingly fast progress for someone who had presumably never been in the Raven Rock Mine before. Teldryn lost track of him almost immediately, only picking up the trail again when he heard the sound of wooden planks cracking from a hole in the center of the mine. He looked down the hole. At the bottom, about twenty feet or so, Miraak was tearing down a makeshift barricade someone had constructed to block off a tunnel. He hadn’t gotten there by jumping down the hole. If he had, Teldryn definitely would have heard it.</p><p>It was a viable shortcut, though. Very coarsely cut out—it had probably been used for a pulley system to hoist the ore up to the top of the mine. There were plenty of rough handholds, and an unintended shelf at the halfway point might even hold his weight. The main question was: could he scale it quietly? There was a time when the answer was an unambiguous yes, but it had been a while since then. Most of his work didn’t require that level of finesse anymore. He missed it, sometimes.</p><p>Teldryn’s brief moment of nostalgia was interrupted by the sight of Miraak kicking through the last plank and entering the tunnel. Time to see if he could still climb down two stories in five seconds without making a sound.</p><p>Scrambling down to the shelf ended up summoning years of muscle memory before he consciously remembered any actual rules. “Keep your hips close to the wall, always have three points of contact, never trust a roof tile,” and so on. He had stopped for less than a second before he heard the metallic squeal of a rusty gate opening, and he rolled off the edge of the shelf, turning to land on the balls of his feet, knees bending, followed shortly by his hands and forearms. He’d landed on a wooden walkway, which absorbed a bit of the impact, and the sound of the gate covered whatever sound the walkway made when he hit it. Not the best he could manage, he noted as he scrambled towards the tunnel, but good enough.</p><p>The open gate lead into a small cavern, reinforced with wooden beams, and a hole in the side of the cavern continued down into another. As Teldryn stepped into the shallow water covering the ground of this second chamber, he took in the stone carvings, the central pillar, the niches lined with embalmed corpses.</p><p>Crescius had been <em>right</em>. The stubborn fetcher.</p><p>Teldryn moved along slowly, as silently as possible, softening his breath as much as he could stand. He knew very well that the dead in Nordic barrows followed a very different standard for behavior than most corpses, and he considered it a good argument in favor of cremation. Urns packed with ancestral ash were not known for getting up and shouting in anyone’s face. They had manners.</p><p>He side-stepped around an obvious pressure plate, ascended a short flight of stairs, and turned into a small chamber with some draugr seated stiffly within a set of thrones. On the other side of the chamber, he saw Miraak in profile, walking unmolested past a patrolling draugr. It wasn’t that it didn’t notice him—it actually turned to nod at him as he passed.</p><p>Before the implications of this had a chance to sink in, the draugr in the nearest throne opened its glowing blue eyes and raised its head to stare at Teldryn. With a displeased hiss, it stood up and drew its sword. Teldryn’s hand flew to his hilt—</p><p>He saw Miraak turn to look at him. He turned hard enough that Teldryn watched him stumble, thrown off-balance by his own motion. It had to have taken less than a fraction of a second, but it felt like it took much, much longer.</p><p>And then he Shouted.</p><p>The word <strong>DREM</strong> enveloped the room. It bounced in endless echoes off the stone. It vibrated through Teldryn’s armor as if it was nothing, and he froze.</p><p>“<em>Stand down</em>,” he yelled, in the normal way, almost plowing through the patrolling draugr as he ran back to the other side of the chamber.</p><p>Teldryn noticed two things in one instant: One, that the draugr had lowered its sword when Miraak Shouted, and Two, that both it and the patrolling draugr were staring at Miraak as if he had sprouted another head.</p><p>“Los rok laan?” the throne draugr asked him.</p><p>“Volaan nuz ni paal,” Miraak replied as he passed the throne, slightly out of breath. “Ni nos rok.”</p><p>It slowly sheathed its sword with an look of unadulterated confusion on its face. Teldryn would never have guessed that draugr could be <em>that</em> expressive.</p><p>He removed his hand from his sword hilt as Miraak turned to face him.</p><p>“Teldryn Sero,” he said, still breathing with noticeable effort. “You should not be here.”</p><p>It was the first time they had ever spoken, and he already knew his name.</p><p>“To be fair,” said Teldryn, trying to summon his usual wry tone, “I was expecting the remains of a cave-in, not a barrow full of draugr.”</p><p>Miraak tilted his head curiously. “You would not be down here for Crescius. He would never pay your price.”</p><p>He crossed his arms and gave a casual shrug. “Who said I was here for Crescius?”</p><p>A long pause. “It couldn’t be Lleril Morvayn,” said Miraak. “He genuinely believes that the mine dried out.”</p><p>Teldryn said nothing, only giving a head tilt of his own. He <em>had</em> been nervous at the thought of being grilled for answers, since he hadn’t even prepared a decent lie in advance, but this guessing game that was happening instead was disarmingly amusing.</p><p>“Ulen wouldn’t be that desperate, would he?” At this point, Miraak was practically muttering to himself. Teldryn couldn’t help but grin inside his helmet at how far he was stretching for likely patrons. There wasn’t even an Ulen in Raven Rock—only an Ulen ancestral tomb.</p><p>Eventually Miraak sighed with resignation and shook his head. “Even after all this time, you still have your mysteries, Teldryn Sero.” Before he could respond to this statement, Miraak had reached over to untie his coin purse from his belt, tossing it to him with a simple gesture. Teldryn’s hand flew up and caught it mid-air, almost out of habit, and he was immediately hit with a wave of uncharacteristic guilt.</p><p>“I will double whatever you have been paid,” said Miraak, turning to leave. “Consider that your down payment. What I cannot give you today, you will have tomorrow.”</p><p>Not even all the ash yams in Vvardenfell could get him double the usual fee in that time.</p><p>Teldryn secured the coin purse on his belt and sprinted a bit to catch up to Miraak, who looked back at him in confusion.</p><p>“What are you doing?” he asked.</p><p>“Well, <em>muthsera</em>,” said Teldryn, tossing on enough sarcasm to hopefully hide his guilt. “You <em>did</em> just become my patron. At an extremely generous rate, might I add.”</p><p>“Ah,” said Miraak, a tone of genuine surprise in his voice, as if the idea had only just occurred to him. “I suppose I did.”</p><p>At some point he was going to have to tell him that double nothing is still nothing. But that would have to come later.</p><p>_</p><p>There was something unreal, almost dreamlike about walking through a Nordic barrow without fighting a single draugr. Not for lack of draugr, even—the place was full of them, but when they stirred, they looked to Miraak, and when they saw him, they nodded with recognition. Some bowed their head as he passed. A bizarrely eager-sounding deathlord called out to him from a bridge beside a waterfall, and received what seemed like a polite reply, though Teldryn had no way of knowing for sure. He even pulled a lever on the other side to open the door forward and waved them on their way.</p><p>He could feel their icy stares at the back of his head, too, of course. But honestly—was that any worse than Windhelm? In some ways, it might even be an improvement.</p><p>Rubble from a collapse blocked the apparent intended path, and Miraak stopped to talk quietly with one of the draugr. She pointed with a withered finger to a hole in the wall, which led into a narrow, twisting passageway that emerged high up in a natural cavern of hexagonal basalt columns. Two waterfalls cascaded on either side of an ancient stone door, eventually merging into a stream that flowed through the cavern and disappeared into the depths. It took careful footing as they jumped down from column to column, the stones damp with mist from the falls, and crossed the stream to approach.</p><p>A skeleton laid on the ground beside the stream; Miraak walked past it without pause. A short flight of steps brought them to a landing before the door, where another skeleton laid on a bedroll beside a long burnt-out lantern, a greatsword with a red blade, and a leather-bound journal. Here he stopped, kneeling beside the bedroll as he reached into his robes and withdrew a folded bolt of linen, unfurling it on the ground beside him and smoothing out the wrinkles.</p><p>He worked quickly but carefully, Teldryn noted. The human body contains over two hundred bones, some of them very small indeed, and Miraak began with the smallest. With a light touch, he cautiously sorted out carpals and metacarpals; tarsals and metatarsals; proximal, intermediate, and distal phalanges. With the bones of the hands and feet safely transferred to the cloth, he moved on to the unwieldy spikes of vertebrae and the awkward shapes of the ribs, clavicle, kneecaps and scapula. He was clearly not new to the art of handling the remains of the dead.</p><p>Miraak did not pause until he reached for the skull, carefully lifting it away from the mandible by the skullcap. He held it in his hands for a few thoughtful seconds, turning it around to look into its orbits.</p><p>“He does not look anything like he did when you last saw him,” he mused.</p><p>For a moment, Teldryn forgot to breathe.</p><p>“I’m afraid I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” he said.</p><p>“It’s not surprising that you would not remember him,” Miraak said. “He was no one important to you. It was just one simple job among many. Falco paid you well, and that was the end of it.” With a sigh, he carefully placed the skull beside the other bones on the cloth and moved on to the lower jaw.</p><p>Knowing his name before the first time they spoke was one thing. Knowing the details of his work two centuries earlier was quite another.</p><p>“Is this your idea of a joke?” Teldryn asked, crossing his arms. “Because if it is, it’s not very funny.”</p><p>He set the jaw down on the cloth, and remained still for a moment, his hands resting in his lap.</p><p>“I know that I have the advantage of you,” he finally said, reaching forward for the pelvic bone. “If you wanted the residents of Raven Rock to know such things, you would tell them. I have no intention to threaten that.”</p><p>“That doesn’t answer my question,” said Teldryn.</p><p>Despite his silence, something in the movement of his head made it clear that he was fully aware of the difference between the literal question Teldryn had asked, and the actual question that wore it as a shield.</p><p>“When you were here then,” he said, hesitating as he spoke, “you needed to earn the trust of the Skaal. You were sent out to perform the Ritual of the Gifts, as instructed by the village shaman.” He slowly began to transfer over the bones of the arms.</p><p>Teldryn remembered this. It was actually six rituals, performed to awaken six standing stones, and it meant he had to traipse all over the damn island before it was done. He’d had to fight a riekling for a handful of seeds. He’d had to act as an armed escort for a literal bear. He’d even had to swim after a horker, for Azura’s sake. Every task felt inane and ridiculous, though the effect on the stones seemed real enough, and he was relieved when it was all over and he could move on.</p><p>It had never occurred to him to wonder what, exactly, awakening the stones would <em>do</em>.</p><p>“From a great distance,” Miraak continued, “I saw you carry out the Ritual. You did not and could not know how much of a service you performed for me, then.” He paused as he transferred over the smaller bones of the leg, leaving only the two femurs remaining. “If not for you, I might never have returned to Solstheim. I might have always…”</p><p>He trailed off, leaving whatever he had been about to say hanging in the air like a corpse on the gallows. Teldryn watched him in silence as he moved over the final two bones and began to bundle up the remains with the efficient care of a midwife swaddling a newborn.</p><p>When he was done, he picked up the bundle, stood up, and turned to Teldryn. “I need to ask you to do something,” he said.</p><p>“What did you have in mind?” asked Teldryn.</p><p>“I cannot carry Gratian and open the door as well,” said Miraak. “If you would carry him, at least for a time, it would help.”</p><p>It was a little weird that he was referring to a disassembled skeleton by name, but it was hardly the strangest request he’d ever had from a patron. “Not a problem,” he said, taking the bundle from Miraak’s hands. “Anything else?”</p><p>“Not at this time,” he replied. He bent down, slipping the journal into his robes and retrieving the sword with both hands. It looked slightly awkward in his hands, his two-handed stance not entirely polished, but Teldryn was still surprised by the speed with which he turned to the door and let loose a series of swings, ribbons of light slicing forward through the air to hit carved sections of the wall and lintel in a precise order. The stone decorations groaned and shifted with each strike, lighting up with magic as they settled into place. The last slice went down the middle, and with the grinding of heavy stone, the two halves of the door began to slide open.</p><p>What a terribly inefficient way to lock a door. Though, again, not the worst Teldryn had ever seen. At least no one was having to listen to strange, sourceless music and then reproduce the tune on that classic instrument, “stalagmites in some random cave”.</p><p>There seemed to be a rule of some kind that every Nordic barrow, every last one, had to have a long, wide corridor in it leading to a door no one could ever open. Most of them had walls lined with bias carvings of the old pantheon—the snake, the moth, the owl, that sort of thing. Whoever had built this barrow had decided the effort put into carving all those walls should, instead, go into a series of pendulum blade traps. It was a unique aesthetic, certainly.</p><p>It was not the first trap they’d encountered in the barrow, but it was the first one where instead of casually disarming it, Miraak let out an awkward cough and looked at Teldryn.</p><p>“You can’t disable this one, can you?” asked Teldryn.</p><p>Miraak shook his head. “I have a way to get through safely on my own, but it will not work for you.”</p><p>“Oh, is that all?” He chuckled slightly. “You don’t need to worry about me. I can manage a few swinging blades on my own. Watch.”</p><p>Before Miraak could reply, Teldryn broke into a run, sprinting down the corridor. It wasn’t simply a matter of outrunning the blades, of course. He had to weave one way to avoid the arc of one set of blades, then pivot another way to avoid the next. Of course, technically speaking he didn’t have to weave and pivot and dodge as much as he did. He acknowledged partway through that he was showing off a bit, recklessly flaunting his skill while carrying roughly twenty pounds of human bone under one arm. Fortunately, luck decided not to punish his hubris: he made it through entirely intact, without so much as a nick in the chitin.</p><p>When Teldryn turned around and gestured to Miraak at the other end of the corridor, the only response he received was a Shout. In an instant, Miraak’s figure became transparent, wisp-like, and he calmly walked down the corridor, the blades passing through him as if he wasn’t even there.</p><p>“Now that’s just cheating,” said Teldryn, as Miraak walked up and pulled the lever beside him to open the door.</p><p>They entered into a large chamber, the door turning out to be only one of two entrances into it. Tall vaulted pillars ran along its length until it ended at one of those massive wall monuments so often found in Nordic ruins. A platform thrust out into the middle of the room, surrounded on three sides by a great pit lined with stairs, though perhaps the stairs were originally intended as seating. It was flooded now, in any event, and the only purpose it could serve would be as a decorative pool.</p><p>Or perhaps not so decorative, Teldryn realized, as the surface of the water began to ripple and a dragon priest emerged from below.</p><p>Miraak did not seem to be concerned. He continued onto the platform as the dragon priest righted himself in the air, water cascading from his scalloped mask. He turned and looked at Miraak standing before him with the greatsword raised.</p><p>Miraak simply turned the sword around, careful not to touch the blade, and offered it to the dragon priest hilt-first.</p><p>“Zahkriil, Zahkriisos,” he said, sounding almost amused.</p><p>The priest wordlessly floated over and took the sword from him. Despite the lack of muscle on his bony frame, he seemed to have no difficulty giving it a few test swings in the air—fortunately without sending magic flying everywhere—and then, seemingly satisfied, he tossed it behind him into the water, where it sank out of sight.</p><p>“Hi lost daal, Miraak,” the priest said to him. “Boaan tiid aloka hin junaar?”</p><p>“Krosis,” he replied. “Junaar mahlaan. Zu’u lost meyz zaam.”</p><p>More of that draugr talk, thought Teldryn as he found a nearby stair to sit on and set the bundle down beside him. He couldn’t make head or tail of it, honestly. It didn’t even sound anything like living Nords did.</p><p>Still. In a surreal way, it wasn’t entirely different. The conversation had very quickly become heated, passionate in a very particular and extremely Nordic fashion. Even though one of them was a dragon priest and the other was… whatever Miraak was, it wasn’t that hard to look at the two of them making forceful assertions in each other’s masked faces—complete with zealous Nordic arm flailing and hand gestures—and imagine it progressing to the usual “punch-me-hard-in-the-gut-I-dare-you” acts of bravado with just a flagon of mead or two.</p><p>“Ful, los rok thuriil?” The priest was looking past Miraak, leaning slightly to the side. Looking directly at <em>him</em>, Teldryn was pretty sure.</p><p>“Ni zaamii,” Miraak replied, hastily, glancing back over his shoulder. “Dii zeymahzin. Rok koraav nid, mindok nid, tinvaak nid.”</p><p>“Nid nuz dilon tinvaak nid,” the priest intoned, dryly.</p><p>They were definitely talking about him, now. Teldryn might not have understood the words, but he could certainly read the atmosphere.</p><p>“Elf,” the priest said, suddenly, calling back to him. “Come here. I have a question to ask of you.”</p><p>Teldryn wasn’t particularly thrilled about the tone of that “elf”, but approached anyway. “Yes, serjo?”</p><p>The priest crossed his arms, nodding at him. “In the laws of your people, if a man is in his house and a thief breaks into this house, is he required to stand by and watch that thief take his possessions? Or may he act to protect his property?”</p><p>Ah. So <em>that’s</em> what this was about. Teldryn glanced at Miraak, who shook his head, looking down and to the side.</p><p>“If he’s brave enough, serjo, he’s certainly allowed to,” said Teldryn. “Though I’m sure most people wouldn’t risk it. They’d hide until it was over and run to the guard instead.”</p><p>“And if the intruder attacks others in his household,” he said, light flaring through the eyes of his mask, “Would most people simply ‘hide until it was over’ and then ‘run to the guard’?”</p><p>“No,” Teldryn conceded. “That would be clear self-defense.”</p><p>The priest turned back towards Miraak, every inch of his hovering figure exuding smug satisfaction.</p><p>“Unfortunately,” he continued, “the barrow isn’t legally your property.”</p><p>The priest’s head snapped back, glaring at Teldryn, a snarl escaping from under the mask. Miraak’s head shot up, looking back and forth between the priest and Teldryn with sudden concern.</p><p>He raised his hands slightly, palms out and open. “Now, now, I’m not saying it <em>isn’t</em> your property. You did ask me about the laws of my people, serjo, and I can say with certainty—if your claim isn’t documented thoroughly by at least one of the Five Houses, it legally doesn’t exist.”</p><p>The priest stared at him, bewildered. “We have been on Solstheim since long before your people even knew it existed. The barrow is thousands of years old. Anyone with eyes could see that we were here first!”</p><p>“Anyone with eyes could see that the Urshilaku tribe had been staking their yurts all over the West Gash for centuries,” replied Teldryn with a shrug. “Didn’t make any difference. They ended up getting pushed straight into the Ashlands. Couldn’t even file a court appeal because they weren’t documented citizens of Morrowind.”</p><p>He hissed. “What are you saying?”</p><p>“I’m saying,” said Teldryn, “that you’re lucky it was Miraak who came down here, because the moment House Redoran realizes the mine still has plenty of ebony in it, you’re never going to have a minute’s peace again.”</p><p>Miraak crossed his arms, looking at the priest with an angle to his head and shoulders that seemed to say “I told you so”.</p><p>“Faaz nah!” The priest threw up his hands in disbelief. “They would be throwing their lives away!”</p><p>“No, the <em>Redoran guards</em> would be throwing their lives away,” said Teldryn, patiently. “The Redoran Council gets to give the order from the comfort and safety of Blacklight.”</p><p>“Fen win unslaad kein,” said Miraak, solemnly. “You cannot win, you cannot survive, and you cannot even leave a scar.”</p><p>At this, the priest was quiet. No hisses, no snarls, no curses. Just an excruciatingly long moment of silence.</p><p>“I can deeply sympathize with your… Urshilaku,” he said, finally, hesitating on the unfamiliar word.</p><p>“Bo wah Reythsegol,” Miraak said, and the priest’s head whipped around to stare at him in shock.</p><p>“Vahlokke do Reythsegol—”</p><p>“<em>Thuri</em> lost kriaan pah,” he spat, and Teldryn couldn’t help raising an eyebrow. He had absolutely no idea what they were going on about, but the amount of poison he’d managed to cram into his tone was impressive.</p><p>Before the priest could respond to this, Miraak was already striding to the second entrance, his hand resting on his sword’s guard.</p><p>“Come, Teldryn,” he said. “It’s time for us to clear a path.”</p><p>_</p><p>Miraak moved with seemingly unstoppable determination, making him possibly the first person Teldryn had ever known who could blow right past an imposing lectern to the staircase behind it without so much as a glance. He appreciated that—the ominous tome on it reeked of Oblivion, and <em>that</em> was just about never worth the trouble it brought.</p><p>The short spiral staircase led up to a door, and the door led into yet another narrow, twisting passageway. This one seemed to be less of a stopgap and more an intentional feature, as it led to what Teldryn instantly realized was the backside of a hidden door. When Miraak pulled the chain next to it, causing it to open into a cobweb-ridden recess tucked away in the back corner of another chamber, it only confirmed his suspicions.</p><p>Miraak, it seemed, was not a fan of stealth. They could hear coarse voices talking and the sound of a crackling fire. Before Teldryn had a chance to take in his bearings beyond that, Miraak had already drawn his sword and started charging into the room.</p><p>How very Nordic of him, thought Teldryn as he set the bundle on the ground and drew his own.</p><p>They rounded some stone debris and found themselves in a reaver camp set up in the ruins of a much more typical Nordic barrow. A very comfortable looking one, even. They’d set up a proper hearth-fire at one end with a cooking spit and a cast iron pot. One reaver in furs had been leaning over an alchemy table in another corner; she stumbled back with surprise at the sight of Miraak barging in out of seemingly nowhere. Another reaver in bonemold armor had been sitting in a chair in the middle. The chair clattered to the ground as he sprang to his feet, swinging his war axe up in time to parry Miraak’s first attack.</p><p>Neither reaver seemed to take any notice of Teldryn, which was fine by him. Normally he had to summon a fire atronach to distract people this much; Miraak was probably less likely to set everything on fire. Probably.</p><p>Miraak and the bonemold reaver were keeping each other busy with dodged swings, hard blocks, and parries. The reaver in furs watched them cautiously from the sidelines, waiting for her moment to strike. Magic flared in her hands—sparks, from the looks of it. Teldryn silently crept closer, raised his free hand, and sent a stream of fire into her face.</p><p>She screamed, falling back with her hands over her face. This drew the attention of the bonemold reaver enough for Miraak to strike under one arm, the blade of his sword slicing up and through the netch leather in the gap between plates in the armpit. It went deep; with a cry, the reaver dropped his axe, grabbing at his arm with his other hand. Blood gushed from the wound in spurts and ran down his side.</p><p>Whether it was the scream, the cry, or the sounds of battle in general, it was hard to say, but something sent a third reaver running in from another alcove. Teldryn had just thrust his sword into the belly of the mage when he saw him raise his bow and take aim. As he let loose, Teldryn threw himself to the side with the skewered reaver as a counterbalance, and the arrow landed between her shoulder blades with a loud <em>thunk</em>.</p><p>Miraak had been standing with a foot on the bonemold reaver’s chest, his sword plunged into his neck. He turned, both hands still on his hilt, and Shouted in the direction of the archer. It was like his entire body was backhanded by an invisible fist, sending him crashing into the wall and his bow clattering across the ground. Before he could stand up, Miraak had wrenched his sword out and stalked over to the fallen archer, raising the still dripping blade and bringing it down on him in one merciless strike.</p><p>“Well, that was messy,” said Teldryn, pulling his sword out of the reaver mage’s corpse and flicking the blood off.</p><p>Miraak paused, still looking down on what remained of the archer. “When is battle ever clean?”</p><p>He shrugged. “If you want to avoid bloodshed, there’s always poison.”</p><p>“Poisoned men vomit and foam at the mouth,” replied Miraak. “And worse happens at the other end.”</p><p>“That’s certainly a way to describe it,” said Teldryn.</p><p>With the area clear of hostiles, there was finally time to look around and figure the space out. It was, indeed, an excessively homey camp for one set up inside a barrow. Someone had used bookshelves between the decorative pillars to carve out a cozy little bedroom for themselves, complete with a proper bed, actual furniture, and valuables they certainly didn’t need anymore. If you ignored the lack of a door and the draugr in the wall niches—</p><p>There weren’t draugr in the wall niches, he realized. There was one skeleton that looked more like Gratian than anything else, and that was it. He paced around the barrow to give it a closer look, in case it was just the living area that was so oddly bereft.</p><p>The niches were all empty. Despite a pile of burning corpses in one alcove, they didn’t look like they had been emptied out over time by increasingly desperate grave robbers—if the mounds of undisturbed dust were anything to go by, there had never been any corpses in most of them to begin with. The burning corpses might not have even come from the barrow, if the nearby bodies of a dead Altmer and Imperial were anything to go by.</p><p>The whole thing was a decoy barrow. The real barrow was a fortress. It laid behind a hidden door which led to the chamber of a dragon priest, and then to reach the barrow proper you would still have to negotiate a corridor of pendulum blades and a door which could seemingly only be opened by the priest’s own sword, which was kept on the <em>other</em> side of the door.</p><p>Teldryn had always assumed the draugr were meant to serve the priest, not the other way around. Clearly the relationship was more complicated than he’d thought.</p><p>He returned to the center and watched as Miraak bent down to the bonemold reaver’s corpse and removed his coin purse, opening it to do a rough count as he stood back up. With a nod of satisfaction, he tied it closed.</p><p>“This should be enough to reach your usual price,” he said, turning to offer the purse to Teldryn. “Hopefully I am halfway to what I have promised, and not a quarter.”</p><p>He was, it seemed, completely sincere in his implication that someone else might hire Teldryn for double the normal amount. From anyone else that would have come across as shameless flattery. Possibly even flirting.</p><p>“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said, taking the purse. “This is enough.”</p><p>Miraak shook his head. “I promised you double what you’ve been paid, and you will have it.”</p><p>He crossed his arms. “And what if I haven’t been paid at all?”</p><p>This prompted a confused tilt of the head.</p><p>“For more than fifty years you’ve insisted on payment upfront,” he said. “No exceptions.”</p><p>“That’s right,” said Teldryn. “And if you know that, then you know that I haven’t done down payments in twenty. If you don’t have enough coin on you for the full amount, I’m not going anywhere.” He shrugged. “I’ve broken that streak now, but the fifty years stay intact, at least.”</p><p>Miraak did not move or say anything, and even with the mask, Teldryn could tell he was staring at him in complete bewilderment.</p><p>“Do I have to spell it out for you?” He sighed. <em>“No one hired me.”</em></p><p>He continued to stare at him for a few moments, looked away briefly, then looked at Teldryn again.</p><p>“You were following me on your own,” he said, his tone so full of disbelief that it was veering close to becoming a question.</p><p>“What can I say?” He chuckled, leaning back against a stone pillar and crossing his legs. “You’re currently the most intriguing person in Raven Rock, if I can’t nominate myself.”</p><p>Miraak sat down in one of the chairs by the hearth, staring at the hearth-fire.</p><p>“I never dared assume you would take an interest,” he said. “Even out of curiosity.”</p><p>“So, let me get this straight,” said Teldryn, looking up in thought. “You feel familiar to everyone in Raven Rock but no one knows why, you walk among draugr and dragon priests like it’s no big deal, you speak draugr, you shout like a draugr, and you clearly know how to handle yourself in a fight—but you assumed I wouldn’t find any of that interesting?”</p><p>“You did not see most of that before following me,” he replied. “And a feeling of familiarity is not anything by itself.” He bent forward in his chair, clasping his hands together before him. “Besides, I am… not in the position I had hoped to be in when we first met.”</p><p>Teldryn hummed. “And what position would that be?”</p><p>Miraak said nothing. He continued to stare into the hearth-fire, apparently lost in thought.</p><p>It all should have been resolved by this. He’d turned a misunderstanding into a standard hire at the usual rate, and he’d come clean about following him. Miraak wasn’t bothered by that part, only inexplicably confused by the idea that Teldryn would be curious about him in the first place. It wasn’t a perfect situation, but it should have been enough.</p><p>It wasn’t enough. Something was missing.</p><p>He was going to have to take a chance on it, wasn’t he?</p><p>Teldryn took a deep breath, reached over, and knocked on the wood of the bookshelf next to him. It was the “hello, I am here and ready” knock used in Dunmeri bath clubs.</p><p>Miraak looked up with surprise, then seemed to catch himself.</p><p>“Ah,” he said, facing away. “You saw me there yesterday, then. I suppose I… stand out, more than most—”</p><p>That was the moment he turned his head back, and Teldryn knew he’d seen his hand. After he’d finished the knock on the bookshelf, he’d left it resting there, one finger crossed over the other: one of the hand signals used in the bath clubs. A signal Miraak would recognize, because he was the one who used it.</p><p>It knocked the wind right out of him. For a solid minute, he didn’t seem capable of breathing, let alone talking.</p><p>“It was <em>you</em>,” he finally said, quietly, with awe in his voice.</p><p>That tone was dangerous. It sent a shiver down his spine. For a fraction of a second, Teldryn was tempted to drag him out of the chair and over to the bed, and Azura knows who’d last been in that thing.</p><p>“I have to say,” said Teldryn, with some light wickedness, “I can’t imagine how you’d manage a better first impression than that.”</p><p>Miraak stood up suddenly, forcefully, turning and walking towards him in a way that Teldryn <em>quite</em> liked—</p><p>His boot hit the corpse of the bonemold reaver, and he stopped. He looked down at it, then over to the corpse of the reaver mage, as if suddenly remembering they were in a reaver camp surrounded by dead reavers.</p><p>“There are six more outside,” Miraak said, deflating slightly.</p><p>Teldryn sighed. “I suppose we’ll need to deal with them, then.”</p><p>What a nuisance.</p><p>_</p><p>It was Miraak’s turn to carry the bundle as they opened the barrow door and stepped outside for the first time in hours. An ancient stone walkway led out from the entrance, though the second half of it looked to have crumbled away at some point in the distant past. Someone had tacked on a wooden extension to turn it into a bridge between the barrow and the ruins of a much younger fortress.</p><p>Their arrival immediately drew the attention of a reaver standing at the other end of the bridge. She belted out a war cry, drawing her sword and charging at Miraak shield-first. Miraak did not draw his weapon or slow down his pace; he simply Shouted the charging reaver off the bridge without breaking his stride, ignoring the reaver’s scream as she plummeted to the ground.</p><p>For Teldryn, that kind of moment was the silver lining of fighting alongside a Nord’s Nord. It never failed to put a smile on his face.</p><p>An archer on a lower level scrambled off his stool, fumbling as he tried to nock an arrow. He was so focused on Miraak he almost didn’t notice the fire atronach being summoned right next to him. An unfortunate fact about bows—they’re basically no better than a stick as a melee weapon, and tend to be rather flammable. Teldryn tutted to himself as he watched the archer panic and start swatting a fire elemental with what amounted to a rapidly burning twig. They really were allowing anyone to be a reaver these days.</p><p>Sword drawn, Teldryn crept down the ramp into the tower and down the stairs. He left the atronach to her own devices, which seemed to be going well if the agonized screams of the archer were any indication, and peered around the door frame outside.</p><p>On the walkway above, Miraak had found another reaver and finally drawn his sword. In the light of day, it went beyond a strangely organic aesthetic—Teldryn didn’t have the clearest view, but he could swear that every swing and every thrust sent one of the decorative tendrils whipping out before the blade. Of course, it could’ve been an illusion enchantment of some kind, something to distract his opponent or act as misdirection.</p><p>Out of the corner of his eye, Teldryn saw a reaver dashing into the ground floor of the other tower. He readied a spell in his hand and crossed the stone connecting the two towers. As with the archer, his attention was entirely on Miraak as he ascended the stairs, and he did not notice Teldryn sneaking up behind him. He did notice the sword in his back, of course. A little too late to do anything about it, but better late than never, Teldryn supposed.</p><p>He heard a surprised cry from the reaver above, rushing closer and then ending in a sudden impact outside. No Shout this time. Must’ve been thrown off by the force of a blow. Another reaver came rushing in and up the stairs, which was a nasty surprise—mostly for the reaver, because startling Teldryn when he has his sword out and a flame spell ready means being set on fire and then stabbed in the neck.</p><p>When Teldryn found Miraak, he was at the top of the second tower, standing over the decapitated corpse of the last reaver. From the position of the body and the pattern of the blood, it looked like he’d chopped it off in one hard swing while the reaver was still standing: an impressive feat with a one-handed sword.</p><p>“Where’s the head?” asked Teldryn.</p><p>“It fell,” Miraak replied, nodding towards a wooden table. The floor underneath it was missing a few planks, and when Teldryn peered down through them, the head had, indeed, landed on the floor below.</p><p>“They really should have done some repairs,” he sighed, sheathing his sword and resting his hands on his hips. “Well, where to now?”</p><p>“We head south,” said Miraak, “towards the Earth Stone.”</p><p>“In other words, back to Raven Rock.” Teldryn took a scroll from the table and casually wandered back over to a chest in another corner. “Do you mind if I—?”</p><p>“Take whatever you wish,” he said, returning his sword to its sheath. “I have no need of it.”</p><p>He probably did have need of it, Teldryn noted as he knelt and drew out a lockpick. That was classic Nord pride for you, though. Chop off an arm and they’ll insist they’ve still got the other one; chop off both arms and they’d probably find a way to wield a greatsword in their teeth.</p><p>“Word has it you arrived with an Altmer,” said Teldryn, as he began to work on the lock.</p><p>Miraak noticeably stiffened, but said nothing.</p><p>The pick caught on something, yet the lock wouldn’t turn. A bit fiddly, this one. “Are the two of you—?”</p><p>“No,” he said, sharply. “We are not.”</p><p>“No offense intended,” said Teldryn, carefully lifting the pick out to try a different spot. “I just prefer to know in advance if I’m planning to commit adultery.”</p><p>It took Teldryn some effort not to hum with satisfaction at the pause in Miraak’s breath in response. He might have risked coming on a little too strong, but subtle for a Dunmer had an unfortunate way of being invisible for everyone else.</p><p>Teldryn had just slipped the pick back in the lock when Miraak asked a question that made him start with surprise, snapping the pick like a twig.</p><p>“Do you remember when you were released from prison?” he asked.</p><p>He knew his name before they spoke, he knew about his work two hundred years earlier—<em>what a surprise</em> that he knew he’d spent time in prison, too.</p><p>“It’s generally not something you forget,” said Teldryn, carefully extracting the now-useless pick fragment from the lock.</p><p>Miraak took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “When you were released, you were not set free without direction. You had a…” He paused for a minute, trying to think of the word. “Someone you were to report to.”</p><p>“You’re thinking of a probation officer,” replied Teldryn. His situation hadn’t been quite that routine, but it was close enough.</p><p>Miraak nodded. “It is similar,” he said, “except that when he is done with me, I will either be returned to my prison, or cease to be.”</p><p>“In that case,” said Teldryn, “you’re <em>not</em> thinking of a probation officer.”</p><p>None of it had sounded fantastic, but there was something especially alarming about Miraak saying he would “cease to be”. Even with the way he phrased things, it didn’t seem like a poetic term for his own death. He stated it like it was a solid fact, a literal occurrence, an inevitability.</p><p>He turned his attention back to the lock and, irritatingly enough, the first spot he tried to pick worked perfectly. The lock turned as smoothly as a knife cuts through beetle-cheese.</p><p>“Are you sure you don’t want any of this?” asked Teldryn as he opened the chest and sorted through the contents. It was mostly armor and miscellaneous rubbish, fairly disappointing compared to everything in the makeshift bedroom in the barrow, but he did find a few potions, some jewelry, and a number of coin purses with very little in them. Seemed like it was where the reavers tossed their ‘earnings’ before they had time to properly sort it out among themselves.</p><p>Miraak shook his head. “Crescius will insist on giving a reward. His pride will not accept a refusal. It will not be large, but it will be enough.”</p><p>Teldryn scoffed. “Well, that proves it. You’re clearly not doing any of this <em>just</em> for the money.” He removed Miraak’s former coin purse from his belt, set it open on the floor, and started emptying out the half-dozen purses into it. “You already knew what Gratian found down there. You knew it was going to be more time and trouble than whatever Crescius can afford to give you.”</p><p>“He would have only joined his ancestor in death,” replied Miraak. “Retrieving the remains spares him that fate.”</p><p>“So you’ll go to ridiculous lengths to stop an old man from killing himself,” he said, throwing the empty purses back into the chest, “and then while you’re at it, you’ll also try to talk a dragon priest into leaving his own damn barrow.”</p><p>“The credit for that accomplishment belongs to you,” said Miraak, sounding both pleased and amused, “though it is fortunate he did not realize how sarcastic your ‘serjo’ is.”</p><p>Teldryn tied the coin purse back on his belt. “I would have thought it was fairly obvious.”</p><p>He laughed. “Zahkriisos is a true Bloodskal. He would not know sarcasm even if it crawled into his lap and kissed him.”</p><p>“A good thing it wasn’t about to,” he replied, dryly.</p><p>“He will not miss it.” Something in his voice made it clear that he was still smiling under the mask, and he let out a bittersweet sigh. “The work we have done here has helped. Without reavers to slow them down, the barrow will be empty by sunrise.”</p><p>“If that’s the case,” Teldryn noted, “they’ll be able to reopen the mine. Which puts Raven Rock back on the map again.” He stood up and turned to Miraak. “That was your goal from the start, wasn’t it?”</p><p>Miraak turned without responding and began descending the tower stairs.</p><p>“It’s painfully clear that you’re trying to help out,” he continued, following him down. “If you were desperate for money, there are a half-dozen better ways to earn your coin.”</p><p>“I am sure there are,” he replied, not slowing down for a moment.</p><p>“Please tell me you’re not one of those noble types who has to help out literally everyone he meets,” said Teldryn. “It’s the most exhausting method of suicide a man can choose, honestly.”</p><p>“I have no desire to die,” said Miraak. “Even if I did, death would not be an escape from my fate.”</p><p>“Then explain it to me,” he said. “Explain to me why you’re going to so much effort, if you’re not getting anything out of it and you’re not trying to punish yourself for something.”</p><p>They emerged from the base of the tower, stepping out onto the rock-strewn coast. The sun hung low in the sky over the Sea of Ghosts, inching towards sunset.</p><p>“I tried to escape my prison,” Miraak said, finally. “It was a plan that required help from the outside. Without the people of Solstheim, it would have been impossible.”</p><p>Teldryn had some questions about this, but he decided to keep them to himself for the moment as they walked along the coast. Without slowing down, Miraak shifted the bundle of bones out from under his arm to his front, carrying it with both arms in an almost affectionate gesture.</p><p>“I failed to escape,” he continued. “But that is not their fault. Another came and interfered, and dashed my hopes of freedom.” Miraak continued looking ahead as they walked, keeping the sun on his right and never looking away from their destination. “Despite my failure, I owe all of Solstheim a great debt. Perhaps too great to ever repay, but I will try, as long as I am able.”</p><p>Teldryn shook his head, sighing. “In Morrowind, when someone has debts too great to pay, we have a little thing called ‘bankruptcy’.”</p><p>Miraak laughed, louder than he had before, sending echoes off the hills and into the sea.</p><p>_</p><p>They arrived in Raven Rock during the heart of twilight. The Redoran guards were lighting torches for their patrols, shops were closing up for the evening, and people were slowly starting to migrate to the Retching Netch. Miraak strode through with determination, not stopping until he reached the door of the Caerellius house.</p><p>Miraak had only started to shift the bundle in his arms when Teldryn bent forward and knocked on the door for him, smiling to himself at the surprised turn of Miraak’s head. Before he could say anything, however, Aphia Velothi had opened the door to greet them.</p><p>“Miraak!” she exclaimed, a bright smile washing across her face. “You’re back safely! You were down there for so long, we started to—” She glanced down at the bundle and her eyebrows raised. “What’s that?”</p><p>“Gratian Caerellius,” replied Miraak.</p><p>Aphia stared, slack-jawed and dumbfounded, though even without speech she somehow scrounged up enough raw habit to invite them into the house. Crescius had been standing at the hearth, stirring a cast-iron pot, but he turned as they entered, his eyes glistening at the sight of the bundle in Miraak’s arms.</p><p>“Is that really—?”</p><p>“Yes,” said Miraak, carefully handing it over, as if expecting him to drop it.</p><p>“Are you sure it’s him?” asked Crescius, hugging the bundle of his great-grandfather’s remains with a look somewhere between wonder and disbelief.</p><p>“I am,” he said, “but I understand that you need more proof than that.” He reached into his robes and withdrew the leather-bound journal. “I found this with him.”</p><p>Crescius’s eyes grew even wider, and Teldryn watched with amusement as Crescius fumbled around, trying to pass the bundle to Aphia with the grace of two nix hounds crashing into each other on an oiled tarp. When his hands were free, he snatched the journal out of Miraak’s hand, cracking it open and rifling through the pages.</p><p>“I knew it!” he cried. “Gratian didn’t die from a rockfall. That was just a story the Company came up with to keep people away from the tombs.” He clapped the journal shut, tapping at its cover with a grin on his face and a gleam in his eyes. “With this, I can get some closure at last. Make them pay for what they did.”</p><p>Miraak nodded. “You will have your vengeance. But first, look after your ancestor. Give him the rites he has been denied. He has been alone for a very long time.”</p><p>“Of course,” said Crescius, with a hopeful glance to Aphia, who nodded. “I’ve been dreaming of this moment my whole life.”</p><p>“I know,” said Miraak, turning to leave.</p><p>“Hang on,” he said, “I owe you a little more than a debt of gratitude for what you’ve done.” Crescius squinted past Miraak at Teldryn. “You hired him to help you, didn’t you? He’s an expensive son-of-a-horker, that one.”</p><p>Teldryn discreetly patted Miraak on the arm. His attempt to dodge payment was a worthy effort, even if it was also inexplicable and ridiculous.</p><p>Crescius disappeared into another room for a moment, returning with a sack of coins. “Here,” he said, shoving his life’s savings into Miraak’s hands. “It’s not much, but it’s the best an old retired miner can do.”</p><p>At a glance, Teldryn could already tell it was more than his usual fee, but he had no regrets: it was definitely not enough to take on a dragon priest by himself while babysitting an old miner, and this had been the best terrible decision he’d made in years.</p><p>“That went well,” he mused as they walked back from the house towards the Retching Netch. “Did you have any other plans for the rest of the day?”</p><p>“No.” Miraak was still staring at the sack in his hands, baffled by the size of it. “No, that was it.”</p><p>“I’ve noticed you always eat alone in your room,” said Teldryn. “I’m sure you have your reasons. I can hardly criticize, really. For a few years, I never wanted to take my helmet off around anyone else, either.”</p><p>“It’s easier this way,” he replied. He glanced up at the first stars in the night sky. “Though perhaps there wouldn’t be a problem with you.”</p><p>Though Miraak couldn’t see it—or maybe <em>because</em> he couldn’t see it—Teldryn beamed under his chitin helmet. “In that case, I don’t suppose you’d be willing to keep me company over dinner? In my room, of course. For your privacy.”</p><p>Miraak turned his head, staring at Teldryn in silence for a moment before looking ahead again.</p><p>“I should wash up first,” he said, sounding almost embarrassed.</p><p>_</p><p>He did not leave Teldryn waiting long: enough time to remove his armor, take a whore’s bath and change clothes without feeling rushed. When he heard the knock on his door and opened it, Miraak was standing there with a generous tray of stuffed vine leaves, two glasses, and a jar of mazte.</p><p>“I’m not complaining,” said Teldryn, as he waved Miraak in and shut the door, “but I had been expecting that since I invited you, I’d be paying for dinner.”</p><p>“I can afford it,” replied Miraak, setting the tray down on the table. “While I am able, I might as well.”</p><p>He shrugged. “Suit yourself. It’s your money.”</p><p>Secretly, he was relieved that he wouldn’t need to weather Sadri’s teasing until the morning. Miraak didn’t need to know that, of course.</p><p>As he poured mazte for the both of them, Teldryn noted that Miraak was still wearing the same well-worn robes, the same boots and gloves, the same mask and pauldrons. The fabric was dark, so it was hard to say for certain, but a few places seemed a deeper shade than they had been earlier. If Teldryn had to hazard a guess, he’d assume Miraak had made an effort to try and wash off the blood from the afternoon, and then put them back on. Because they were the only thing he had.</p><p>“You know, I’ve never seen robes like those before,” he said, handing Miraak his glass, “and I’ve seen quite a few things in my time.”</p><p>“They are not what they once were,” he replied, which Teldryn took to mean: they’re a mess and I know it. “A friend gave them to me a long time ago.”</p><p>He took a drink. “A close friend?”</p><p>“In a fashion. He was…” Miraak tilted his head and hummed to himself. “I suppose, like a father.”</p><p>“Ah,” said Teldryn. “So he was older?”</p><p>“Much older,” said Miraak, with a sigh. “He looked after me, in his own way. Tried to protect me. He had lost his wife and daughter to war, so I suppose he could not help it.”</p><p>“It’s hard to imagine you needing any protection,” he said, which was vague enough to be halfway to the truth.</p><p>Miraak said nothing for a time, his mask seeming to gaze at Teldryn in a heavy-lidded, unblinking stare. Then he lowered his hood, reached under his mask with one hand, and pulled it off.</p><p>He was the palest Nord that Teldryn had ever seen; paler than some corpses, even. It was like he’d never seen a minute of sun in his entire life. He was clean-shaven, including his scalp, and one side of his face was covered in the twisting striations of a massive, vicious-looking burn scar. It started at the top of his head, flowed down his cheek and across his ear, extended down his jaw onto his neck and continued into his robes with no sign of fading below that point.</p><p>Teldryn had seen worse before, but that had been an especially unfortunate survivor of the Red Year he’d met in Blacklight—she’d been in Gnisis when Red Mountain erupted. With a scar like that, it was a miracle he was alive.</p><p>Miraak stared at him with eyes like a steel sword, waiting for a response.</p><p>“Every Nord has a scar with a story,” said Teldryn, his tone casual, as he reached over and picked up a stuffed vine leaf. “Call it a hunch, but I think you might have them all beat.”</p><p>He glanced away and toward the floor. “It is not a story I enjoy telling.”</p><p>“Then you don’t have to tell it,” replied Teldryn, pausing to take a bite. “It’s your story. If you tell it, you get to decide the when, the where, the who, how, and why.” Another pause for a sip of mazte. “If someone doesn’t like that—well, they’ll just have to live with never knowing, won’t they?”</p><p>Miraak’s expression softened, and the ghost of a smile flickered across his face.</p><p>He could hold his drink, which wasn’t surprising for a Nord, and he knew Sadri put as much effort into his stuffed vine leaves as he did into his sujamma, which <em>was</em> surprising. Only Teldryn had any idea what the recipe had once looked like, decades earlier, and he was sure to have tweaked it a thousand times since then. Before the mine closed, the stuffing always contained horse meat; after it closed, horse was too expensive. Teldryn was sure the current batch contained nix ox. Miraak was adamant that it was a nameless bottom feeder the sailors had started catching and eating in place of mudcrabs when they would wash up on the beach.</p><p>“All right, I admit that would solve the money problem,” said Teldryn, resting his chin in his hand, “but why that? Why that <em>specifically?</em>”</p><p>“He tried it once out of curiosity,” said Miraak, “and realized it was delicious. He does not care how uncommon it is. If he likes it, he will cook with it, and the taste is its own reward.”</p><p>Teldryn couldn’t help but grin. Right or not, Miraak did know how Sadri thought—that was one of the most Sadri things he’d ever heard in his life.</p><p>When the tray was empty and the jar was drained, conversation wound down. There were more pauses. Not uncomfortable pauses; just pauses. Without a mask, Miraak’s face had all kinds of small, fragmentary expressions, even when he tried to keep a straight face. Teldryn found he enjoyed trying to pick them out: the subtle movements of his mouth, the slight widening and narrowing of his eyes, the angle of his one remaining eyebrow.</p><p>At that moment, Teldryn noted, Miraak’s eyes kept darting to the bed.</p><p>In a Dunmeri bath club, the rules were invented to serve a need for safety. Two centuries after the Tribunal’s end, the bath clubs had stuck around, because they still served that need. The rules were clear about what to do, when to do it, where to do it, what was allowed and what wasn’t allowed. It was certain. It was safe.</p><p>In the rest of life, the rules were never clear. Teldryn had to figure them out one person at a time, and pray he didn’t break anything in the process. But this was also where he could see Miraak trying to pretend he wasn’t looking at the bed, betrayed by the blood rushing to his absurdly pale face. This was where he could flash him a devilish grin, and watch a half-dozen emotions play out on his features—worried and hopeful, uncertain and eager, all at once.</p><p>Miraak was taller, broader, a typical Nord, and yet he trembled when Teldryn put his hands on his waist and pulled him close.</p><p>“I can’t promise anything,” he said, his breath heavy as Teldryn’s lips traced his collarbone.</p><p>“That’s fine,” said Teldryn, kissing his neck. It smelled faintly of soap, and was freshly shaved.</p><p>“I don’t know how long I have,” he said, craning his neck to offer his throat. His fingers ran across Teldryn’s scalp; a thumb grazed his ear. “He could show up tomorrow morning.”</p><p>“But not tonight?” He placed a teasingly soft love bite on his neck. A stifled moan rumbled through Miraak’s throat under his mouth.</p><p>“No. Not tonight.”</p><p>“Then let’s just worry about tonight,” said Teldryn, and drew him into a kiss.</p><p>The burn scars continued down Miraak’s arm to the knuckles of his hand, rippling down his shoulders and chest, stretching along his side and hip, and circling most of the length of his leg. It branded nearly an entire half of his body. As he straddled his thighs on top of the bed, Teldryn found himself with a mystifying temptation to trace the edges of the burn with his fingers, to slide his palm along its surface, to feel the cords of scar tissue and pits of sunken skin. He resisted the urge and leaned in closer, watching Miraak’s face with a smile as he slowly slid his hand down his stomach and further, fingertips raking through the pubic hair at the base of his cock.</p><p>Miraak’s hands on his hips twitched, his breath catching, and his gaze flew down to Teldryn’s hand and back up to his face, as if unsure where he was allowed to look. Teldryn just closed his eyes and moved to close the gap—chest against chest, mouth against mouth, tongue against tongue.</p><p>His fingers curled gently around Miraak’s cock, humming with satisfaction at the muffled sound that he couldn’t help making into Teldryn’s mouth as his hand slipped down the shaft to the exposed crown—</p><p>He paused mid-kiss in mild confusion. He was hard, yes, but he wasn’t <em>that</em> hard yet. Almost instinctively, his hand started feeling around, trying to find Miraak’s foreskin as if he’d somehow misplaced it.</p><p>Miraak broke off the kiss and looked at his face. “Is something wrong?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.</p><p>“No, nothing’s wrong, just—” Teldryn lifted himself up on his other arm and looked down between the two of them at the cock in his hand.</p><p>“Ah,” said Miraak. “That.” He turned his face away, almost burying it in the pillow. “That’s just a—mark. There was a ceremony when I was a child. It doesn’t impact anything.”</p><p>“Huh,” said Teldryn, with the same tone he’d use for a surprising tattoo. “I thought only Redguards did that.”</p><p>He turned back slightly, looking at him skeptically. “Redguards?”</p><p>“I’ve been told it’s easier to keep clean in the desert,” replied Teldryn, lowering himself back down onto Miraak’s chest. “Doesn’t seem to impact anything for them, either.”</p><p>“How do you know that?” asked Miraak.</p><p>“Maybe I’ll tell you some time,” he said, and kissed him again.</p><p>Teldryn had needed to shift his weight anyway, to slide down and off to one side to find a more comfortable angle for his wrist. He rested his head on Miraak’s chest, arms wrapped around his shoulders and holding him close as he stroked Miraak’s cock. He kept his pace slow at first, a light touch, and used the tightening and loosening of the grip on his upper arm to judge each change he introduced: too much, too little, too fast, too slow. By the time he found the right balance, Miraak was clutching him tightly, his face pressed into the strip of hair running down the middle of his head, hot breath tickling across his scalp.</p><p>He was trying very hard to stay quiet, Teldryn knew, but Teldryn could also feel the thrum of each noise he was holding back vibrating through him. If only they weren’t in the Retching Netch, he thought, letting out a little moan of his own that brought about another rumble under him in response.</p><p>He could practically feel Miraak’s heartbeat through his cock when a hand dropped down from Teldryn’s shoulder to his wrist. He stopped, lifting his head up towards Miraak’s face. He met Teldryn’s eyes with a pleading look, his lips parted. The moment seemed to last minutes, and yet before Teldryn managed to speak, Miraak had crushed his mouth against his with a force that sent a shiver through him. His hand flew up to clasp the back of Teldryn’s head, and the kiss opened up into something feverish, aching, like he was a hair’s breadth away from death.</p><p>It left them both gasping for air when the traitorous need to breathe forced the kiss to break.</p><p>“Sorry,” said Miraak, seemingly willing his breath to cooperate. “I was about to…” He stared at Teldryn’s mouth and swallowed. “I did not want to finish too soon.”</p><p>Despite the situation and his own state, Teldryn was still able to manage a roguish smile at this. “And when were you hoping to finish, then?”</p><p>“I—” Miraak interrupted himself with the effort to suppress another groan, eyes still fixed on Teldryn’s mouth.</p><p>“Ah, I see,” said Teldryn, pausing to lick his lips. “It’s not a ‘when’, it’s a ‘where’.”</p><p>The way Miraak’s whole body seemed to quiver at that one gesture was all the proof he needed. Which was, of course, why he did it in the first place.</p><p>Teldryn gave him a quick kiss before he began to lower himself down slowly, his mouth close enough that Miraak would feel the heat of his breath on his skin. He was careful not to brush against anything too sensitive, and did not even touch Miraak’s cock until he had settled between his legs, resting his arms on Miraak’s thighs. It had a generous bead of clear fluid at the tip, and the mere act of taking it into his hands summoned another muffled groan.</p><p>As fun as it was to torment him, Teldryn knew he couldn’t push it much farther, and he quickly slipped Miraak’s cock into his mouth, closing his lips around it as he slid it along his tongue. It had a smooth, taut feel to it, clean and tasting mostly of skin and salt, and as it reached the deepest point he could manage without gagging, he thought that it seemed more naked than any other cock he’d sucked before. It was an absurd idea, almost enough to laugh, but it felt raw and exposed in his mouth, utterly at his mercy, and his own cock trembled at the thought of it.</p><p>It took very little to bring Miraak to the point that his hips were bucking, and the held-back moans were becoming quite audible, despite his best efforts. On the way up, Teldryn glanced up at his face, very deliberately doing so while sucking the head of his cock. The moment their eyes met, Miraak was undone—he snatched up the pillow and shoved it over his own face, but as he unraveled it was still not enough to stop his voice from shaking the bed and reverberating through the walls, the jars on the shelf teetering precariously.</p><p>It felt like Teldryn was teetering precariously himself as he swallowed and sat up with the taste of Miraak lingering on his tongue.</p><p>A few seconds passed before Miraak put the pillow aside and sat up as well. He was red in the face, though there were several possible explanations for that, least of all that he’d just smothered himself with a pillow. Slowly, carefully, he reached for Teldryn, pulling him in and wrapping his arms around him tightly. Not everyone wanted to kiss someone whose mouth still tasted like their cock, but apparently Miraak didn’t mind.</p><p>They were still kissing when Miraak’s hand began to glide down Teldryn’s back. Even though its destination was clear from the start, it took a long, wandering diversion across the slopes and planes of his body. There was curiosity in his movements, and sometimes hesitation and uncertainty, even though it was far from trial and error. He had the map and he knew the route, but he still seemed to worry he’d get lost.</p><p>Teldryn was already hard from before, and now he could feel a sliver of a breeze flitting across the head of his cock, emerging on its own from his foreskin. Already a mess—breathing heavily through his nose, making all kinds of undignified noises into Miraak’s mouth. The worst of it was the wanting, the <em>needing</em>, the lens of expectation magnifying each second into excruciating urgency.</p><p>He drew back from the kiss, rested one hand on Miraak’s shoulders, and reached back to the wandering hand with the other. Miraak’s eyes followed as Teldryn brought the hand to his mouth—kissing his knuckles, licking his fingers, lightly sucking a fingertip—and then guided it down to his cock.</p><p>He had no idea what his face looked like then, but judging from Miraak’s expression, it must have been Something.</p><p>It was absolutely no surprise how little time it took before Teldryn was bracing himself on Miraak’s shoulders and thrusting into his hand, moans alternating with breathless cursing about the stubborn refusal of his own hips to <em>stay down</em>. His whole body quaked when he came, spilling out onto Miraak’s wrist.</p><p>He actually felt light-headed from that, Teldryn realized as he melted into Miraak’s arms. He couldn’t even remember the last time that had happened, if it had ever.</p><p>When they were talking in bed later, while curled up against Miraak’s side without scars, Teldryn tried to ask one of the questions he had kept to himself as they were walking back to Raven Rock from the barrow.</p><p>“I get that you were watching from ‘far away’,” he said, as a hand lazily caressed his back. “I understand that part. It’s not like I was laboring under the impression that you just got out of ten years for tax evasion in Cyrodiil.”</p><p>He propped himself up on an arm and looked at Miraak.</p><p>“But <em>this</em>,” Teldryn said, tracing a finger up Miraak’s throat. “This isn’t something you would know from just <em>watching</em>. You learn it from experience.”</p><p>He brought his hand back down, resting it on Miraak’s chest. Miraak remained quiet for some time, his eyes searching Teldryn’s face.</p><p>“I carried your dreams,” he said, finally. “I carried everyone’s dreams.”</p><p>“I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean,” said Teldryn.</p><p>“All things are connected,” said Miraak. “Nothing can truly be destroyed, only transformed or transferred. There must always be a trade.”</p><p>“Well,” he said, drumming his fingers on Miraak’s sternum. “That’s a slight improvement, but it’s still as clear as mud.”</p><p>A weary breath escaped him, less like a sigh and more like a heavy weight had suddenly been lowered onto his chest. After a minute of thought, Miraak rolled onto his side towards Teldryn and placed his forehead against his.</p><p>“You do not work without payment,” he said. “And you do not accept partial payment. Until you are given the full amount, you will not budge.”</p><p>All right. This was a metaphor he could get behind. “Go on,” he said.</p><p>“Given that,” said Miraak, solemnly, “How much would you charge to break a man out of prison?”</p><p>“It depends,” said Teldryn. “What am I going to have to do to break him out?”</p><p>His eyes flicked to the side in thought for a moment.</p><p>“Dig a tunnel,” he finally said. “Into the prison, from the outside, without the warden realizing it’s there.”</p><p>“All by myself?” He scoffed. “Not for all the gold in Stros M’Kai.”</p><p>The weight on Miraak seemed to grow even greater, and in an instant Teldryn regretted what he’d said, but Miraak spoke again before he could say anything more.</p><p>“Not all by yourself,” he said. “You and all of Solstheim.”</p><p>Teldryn blinked at him. Aside from the weight, there seemed to be nothing but sincerity in his voice and on his face.</p><p>“That’s a very big tunnel,” said Teldryn.</p><p>“Nothing less would work,” replied Miraak.</p><p>“And it’s payment in full, in advance?” he asked.</p><p>He nodded, his nose rubbing against Teldryn’s in the process, and looked back at him expectantly.</p><p>“If that’s the case,” he said, slyly, “there’s really only one answer, isn’t there?”</p><p>Teldryn brought his hand up to rest on Miraak’s cheek, running the side of his thumb along the threads of his scar.</p><p>“You can’t pay in full in advance for something,” said Teldryn, staring him right in the eyes, “<em>and</em> have a debt too great to repay because of it.”</p><p>His eyes grew wide for a moment. At such a close distance and in the dim light of a candle sconce, his eyes seemed wet, and it looked almost like there were tiny dark specks in the whites of his eyes that shivered in place, like a beetle rolling on its back in the ash.</p><p>“Ah,” he said, a tone of genuine surprise in his voice, as if he had never expected to hear such a thing. “I suppose that’s true.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Miraak/Teldryn Sero might be a rare pair, but you know what's even rarer? Miraak/The Entire Damn Island of Solstheim Except Reavers I Guess, Unrequited Pining. But really, I'm mostly just playing off the actual text of <i>Waking Dreams of a Starless Sky</i> seemingly implying that Miraak has done some fumbling towards CHIM in the dark. Mix in some bits from Bloodmoon, and you get the kernel of an Idea. As you do.</p><p>Also, I may have committed some kind of Miraak Crime by having a good amount of Dovahzul in the story and then absolutely none in the sex scenes. Please forgive me, fans of Dovahzul dirty talk.</p><p><b>DREM</b> - peace; patience; withholding aggression &amp; refraining from violence. Basically the same as yelling “stand down”, though you could argue he’s shouting <b>CHILL</b> and you wouldn’t even be wrong.</p><p>“Los rok laan?” - “Has he been invited?” / “Isn’t he an intruder?”<br/>“Volaan nuz ni paal. Ni nos rok.” - “An intruder but not an enemy. Don’t attack him.”</p><p>“Zahkriil, Zahkriisos” - “Your sword, Zahkriisos [lit. Sword-Blood]”</p><p>“Hi lost daal, Miraak. Boaan tiid aloka hin junaar?” - “You have returned, Miraak. Has the time come for your kingdom to rise?”<br/>“Krosis. Junaar mahlaan. Zu’u lost meyz zaam.” - “I’m sorry. The kingdom is fallen. I have become a slave.” Using “zaam” implies coercion and the absence of consent.</p><p>“Ful, los rok thuriil?” - “So, is he your master?”<br/>“Ni zaamii. Dii zeymahzin. Rok koraav nid, mindok nid, tinvaak nid.” - “I’m not his slave. He’s my companion. He’s seen nothing, knows nothing, will say nothing.”<br/>“Nid nuz dilon tinvaak nid.” - “None but the dead say nothing.”</p><p>“Faaz nah!” - “Pain fury!” / “Damn you!” though I’m treating it as also being able to act as “fucking hell” and “are you shitting me” depending on context.</p><p>“Fen win unslaad kein.” - “They will wage unending war.”</p><p>“Bo wah Reythsegol.” - “Go to the Tree Stone.”<br/>“Vahlokke do Reythsegol—” - “The Guardians of the Tree Stone—”<br/>“<i>Thuri</i> lost kriaan pah.” - “<i>My master</i> killed them all.”</p><p>“Reythsegol” is coined using the same logic as “qethsegol” (word wall). Plus, I liked the parallel of the stones all being named “-segol” while being connected to “Gol” as a word of power.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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